Robert Silverberg - Halfway House

His unreal voice, which never grew hoarse even when he raised it to a shout, died away. Alfieri leaned on the railing again. The small golden eyes in the narrow slits regarded him impassively.

After a long silence Vuor said, “We will give you our decision shortly.”

The walls of the chamber went opaque. Alfieri paced the little room wearily. The taste of defeat was sour in his mouth, and somehow it did not anger him to know that he had failed. He was past caring. They would let him die, of course. They would tell him that he had done his work, that he had built his company, that it saddened them but they had to consider the needs of younger men whose lifedreams still were unrealized. Then, too, they were likely to think that merely because he was rich he was not deserving of rescue. Easier was it for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to attain new life on the surgeons’ tables of a world beyond the Fold. Yet he couldn’t give up now.

As he awaited his death sentence, Alfieri planned how he would spend his remaining months of life. Working to the end, of course. The heatsink project at Spitzbergen—yes, that first, and then—

The walls were clear again. Vuor had returned.

“Alfieri, we have made an appointment for you on Hinnerang, where your cancer will be remitted and your tissues restored. But there is a price.”

“Anything. A trillion lire!”

“Not money,” Vuor said. “Service. Put your genius to work in our aid.”

“Tell me how!”

“Halfway House, you know, is cooperatively staffed by representatives of many worlds whose continua meet at the Fold. There is not currently an administrator from Earth on our staff. A vacancy is soon to develop. You fill it. Lend us your gift for organizing, for administration. Take a five-year term among us. Then you may return home.”

Alfieri pondered. He had no particular wish to give up five years to this place. Too much beckoned to him on Earth, and if he were away five years, who would take the reins of his companies? He might return and find himself hopelessly out of touch.

Then he realized the absurdity of the thought. Vuor was offering him twenty, thirty, fifty more years of life. Standing at the edge of the grave as he was, Alfieri had no right to begrudge five of those years if his benefactors demanded them. He had made his unique administrative abilities his claim for renewed life; was it any surprise that they now wanted those same abilities as quid pro quo?

“Agreed,” Alfieri said.

“There will, in addition, be a monetary payment,” said Vuor, but Alfieri hardly cared about that.

An infinity of universes met at the Fold, as they did at every other point in space-time. Only at the Fold, though, was it possible now to cross from one continuum to another, thanks to the equipment installed there. A webwork of singularities poked holes in the fabric of universal structures. Halfway House was the shuttle point for this loom of worlds; those who could convince the administrators that they had the right to occupy a valuable place on the transfer channels were shunted to the worlds of their need.

An infinity is an infinity, and the channels filled all needs. There was access, for those who wanted it, to a matter-free universe and to a universe filled with one all-encompassing atom and to a universe containing, a world where living beings grew steadily younger and not the reverse.

There were worlds unknown to the sons of Adam, with tribes whose heads grow beneath their shoulders and their mouths in their breasts; worlds of monoculi, who run swiftly though they have a single leg and a single eye; worlds of folk whose mouths are so small they take nourishment only through a straw; worlds of amoebic intelligences; worlds where bodily reincarnation is an established fact; worlds where dreams become realities at the snap of a finger. An infinity is an infinity. But for practical purposes, only some two dozen of these worlds mattered, for they were the ones linked by common purposes and common orientation.

On one of those worlds, skilled surgeons might repair a cancer-ravaged throat. In time that skill would be imparted to Earth in return for some Earthly good, but Alfieri could not wait for the exchange to be consummated. He paid his fee, and the administrators of Halfway House sent him to Hinnerang.

Alfieri was unaware, once again, as he squeezed through the Schwarzchild singularity. He had always loved tasting unfamiliar sensations, and it seemed unfair to him that a man should be compressed to zero volume and infinite density without some tactile knowledge of the fact. But so it happened. A dying supernova was simulated for him, and he was whisked through the singularity to emerge in one more identical chamber on Hinnerang.

Here, at least, things looked properly alien. There was a reddish tinge to the warm, golden sunlight, and at night four moons danced in the sky. The gravity was half that of Earth’s; and as he stood under that quartet of shimmering orbs, Alfieri felt a strange giddiness and an inner access of ecstatic strength. It seemed to him that he could leap at a bound and snatch one of those jewels from the sky.

The Hinnerangi were small, angular beings with auburn skins, high-vaulted skullcaps, and fibrous fingers that divided and divided again until they formed writhing networks of filament at the tips. They spoke in sinister whispers, and their language struck Alfieri as more barbarous than Basque and as consonant-heavy as Polish; but the usual small devices turned their words to the tongue of Dante when they needed to communicate with him, a miracle that struck Alfieri as more awesome than the whole mechanism of the Fold, which at least he could pretend he understood.

“We will first negate your pain,” his surgeon told him.

“By knocking out my pain sensors?” Alfieri asked. “Cutting nerve lines?”

The surgeon regarded him with what seemed like grave amusement. “There are no pain sensors as such in the human nervous system. There are merely functional bodies that perceive and respond by classifying the many patterns of nerve impulses arriving from the skin, selecting and abstracting the necessary modalities. “Pain” is simply a label for a class of experiences, not always unpleasant. We will adjust the control center, the gate of responses, so that your scanning of input impulses will be orientated differently. There will be no loss of sensory information; but what you feel will no longer be classified as pain.”

At another time, Alfieri might have been happy to discuss the refined semantics of pain theory. Now, he was satisfied to nod solemnly and permit them to put out the fire that raged in his throat.

It was done, delicately and simply. He lay in a cradle of some gummy foam while the surgeon planned the next move: a major resection of tissue; replacement of lost cell matter; regeneration of organs. To Alfieri, wireless transmission of power was an everyday matter, but these things were the stuff of dreams. He submitted. They cut away so much of him that it seemed another slice of the surgical beam would sever his head altogether. Then they rebuilt him. When they were finished, he would speak with his own voice again, not with an implanted mechanism. But would it really be his own, if they had built it for him? No matter. It was flesh. Alfieri’s heart pumped Alfieri’s blood through the new tissue.

And the cancer? Was it gone?

The Hinnerangi were thorough. They hunted the berserk cells through the corridors of his body. Alfieri saw colonies of cancer establishing themselves in his lungs, his kidneys, his intestines. He visualized marauding creatures stabbing good cells with mortal wounds, thrusting their own vile fluid into unwanted places, replicating a legion of goose-stepping carcinomas cell by cell by cell. But the Hinnerangi were thorough. They purged Alfieri of corruption. They took out his appendix, in the bargain, and comforted his liver against a lifetime of white Milanese wine. Then they sent him off to recuperate.